As the calendar turns and September 11 approaches, students prepare for the “conversation.” The “conversation” usually takes place in the classroom and, if you’re lucky, at home. The “conversation” is prompted by teachers and parents – faces we normally look up to as we sit in stunned silence, staring and listening. The “conversation” often includes painful recounting of the day’s events or questions like, “How did we get to this point? How did we get to where we are now?”
It’s understandable that nearly 23 years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, waves of debate still follow each anniversary. Nearly 3,000 dead is a catastrophic loss, not to mention the nationwide unrest in the years that followed. But for a changing America, 9/11 is something that is increasingly heard about but not experienced. This generational gap in understanding then becomes a topic for younger generations, who are not connected by the catastrophe of the attacks, but by the difficult discussions they sparked. This brings us to the shadow of 9/11 discourse – black humor.
Black humor has existed as long as human suffering has existed. Humor itself is a commonly used tool to examine and cope with serious and often controversial issues. The ethos is that if we can laugh at our problems, perhaps all hope is not lost after all. Given the unprecedented scale of the 9/11 disaster, black humor was a natural, if sometimes uncomfortable, part of the healing process. Across America, comedians, news outlets, and ordinary citizens struggled to decide when it was OK to finally make jokes about the attacks. Today, jokes about the attacks are not only more accepted, but expected as discussions on the topic. Just as a wound forms scabs as it heals, humor offers those who experienced 9/11 a possible path to recovery. However, when younger generations, who were not exposed to the same level of the attacks, make humor out of it, the result seems insensitive rather than palliative.
At the core of black humor is lived experience. When you look at trauma from within experience with humor, giggles become chuckles, wounds are healed, and societies are rebuilt. When younger generations joke about a terrorist attack so close to their time and yet so far from their experience, it is like a punch in the dark. There is no basis for understanding, no firsthand account or shock to collide with the punch line and light the fuse of laughter. Instead, most of the comedic value of 9/11 jokes is transferred to shock value. The goal of being funny then becomes the goal of being insensitive, and audiences are left feeling out of place, if not insulted.
It would be wrong to say that jokes about 9/11 aren’t sometimes clever or don’t catch us off guard. Cleverness and taste are separate things in comedy, but that so many of us are willing to trade our respect for other people’s experiences for a laugh is not only trite, it’s hypocritical. We live in a more empathetic age. If younger generations are truly going to stand up for the ideal of acceptance and respect they’ve built, it’s time to stop messing around for a giggle.
